Kevin Drum points to this very interesting article:

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers said the notes show that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

An anonymous “former senior intelligence official’ denies the accusations, but the denial is not terribly fervent: “The former official said he strongly doubted that the White House learned about Ms. Plame from Mr. Tenet.” That is all well and good, but if the notes actually exist and actually say what this article says they say, then that denial is more wishful thinking than useful information.

So what does this mean? Libby is probably in pretty deep trouble — this would seem to indicate a fairly solid perjury case. Lying to a federal prosecutor about a matter of national security is not a small crime.

More importantly, these notes could send Libby and perhaps even Cheney to jail for violating national security laws. The Times article says that the people who leaked Plame’s name had to know about her status in order for a crime to have been committed. That is not entirely true. As Mark A. R. Kleiman (thanks to Billmon for the link) points out, there are espionage laws that would cover these situations:

But Rove’s conduct certainly meets the far less demanding elements of the Espionage Act: (1) possession of (2) information (3) relating to the national defense (4) which the person possessing it has reason to know could be used to damage the United States or aid a foreign nation and (5) wilful communication of that information to (6) a person not entitled to receive it.

Under the Espionage Act, the person doing the communicating need not actually know that revelation could be damaging; he needs only “reason to know.” Classification is generally reason to know, and a security-clearance holder is responsible for knowing what information is classified.

Nor is it necessary that the discloser intend public distribution; if Rove told Cooper — which he did — and Cooper didn’t have a security clearance — which he didn’t — the crime would have been complete.

And to be a crime the disclosure need not be intended to damage the national security; it is only the act of communication itself that must be wilful.

It’s also a crime to “cause” such information to be communicated, for example by asking someone else to do so.

Plame’s status as an employee of the CIA was certainly classified information, else the CIA would have had no grounds to go to the FBI in the first place, not to mention the fact that Libby was on a flight where Plame’s identity was clearly marked in a memo as secret. So it appears that Libby, at least, by leaking, could very well have violated an espionage act. And if Fitzgerald can prove that Cheney either participated in, ordered, or directed the leaking, then these notes would make Cheney culpable as well.

The larger point however, is that Cheney is morally unfit to hold his office. If he did not ask Tenet about Plame’s status, then he should have. One does not just toss the names of CIA agents to the press willy-nilly unless one is quite certain that doing so would cause no harm. Cheney is Vice President of the United States of America. It is unconscionable that he and his staff would participate in cheap personal attacks against political opponents. It is a violation of his oath to protect the country to expose the name of a CIA agent without knowing whether or not that exposure would risk lives or put the country at risk.

If these notes are confirmed, Cheney got the information from Tenet. Either he knew or refused to know what revealing Plame’s name would mean. The man is unfit for office, and anyone defending him at this point is placing party loyalty above the lives of Americans.